3.2.2 Family Environment

On the non-biological side of the
psychiatric dichotomy, the theories that have evolved about environmental
causes for schizophrenia usually focus either on the family environment or the
larger social environment. Those which focus on the family environment
demonstrate a clear pattern of evolution. At first mothers were the focus of
research, on the assumption that some fault in mother/child bonding was the
cause of schizophrenia. Then the focus of research moved on to examine marital
relationships between mothers and fathers with the assumption that some kind of
distortion in these relationships might impact on children and cause
schizophrenia. Finally researchers began to take account of the family
environment as a whole, theorising that any member of a family, or all the
members of a family together, might somehow create conditions of stress that
produced schizophrenia in a family member.

The term ‘schizophrenogenic mother’ was first
coined in 1948 by a psychiatrist named Frieda Fromm-Reichman: ‘The
schizophrenic is painfully distrustful and resentful of other people due to the
severe early warp and rejection he encountered in important people in his
infancy and childhood, as a rule mainly the schizophrenogenic mother.’[61]
There were two ideas embodied in the concept of the schizophrenogenic mother
which made this terminology a powerful message for the times. These two ideas
were the notions of maternal rejection and maternal over-protection.[62]

The post-World-War-II period was one of rapid
cultural change, in which attention was often focussed on the relationship
between mothers and children.[63]
Uncertainty had developed about the quality of mother–infant bonding in
industrialised countries as a result of a variety of factors including a rising
divorce rate, adolescent pregnancies, and working mothers who left their babies
with minders. The satisfying pre-war cultural image of a young mother
successfully nurturing an infant was being eroded.

Social commentators often blamed mothers for
any troubles children had with social adjustment, and also for any problems the
society might have with maladjusted or delinquent children, and other social
stresses. As a result the suburban housewife was often stereotyped as a
frustrated, repressed, disturbed, martyred, never-satisfied, unhappy woman, a
demanding, nagging, shrewish wife, and a rejecting, over-protecting, dominating
mother.[64]

This changing cultural identity of women
enhanced the significance of the role of motherhood in the eyes of
psychiatrists. As faith in the competence of mothers declined, advice was
increasingly sought from professionals on matters concerning nurturing and
child care. But mothers remained powerful. Although they might be perceived as
failing to produce healthy, well-adjusted children, they could still wreak
social havoc by producing deviants.[65]

On top of this, at the same time as women
were increasingly seen as becoming dominant, masculine power was thought to be
on the decline. Popular literature complained about the emasculation of men due
to factors such as the bureaucratisation of work, the rise of the corporate
‘man in the grey flannel suit’, and the demise of individualism. The newly
enfeebled men of the 1950s had castrating women waiting for them in every
suburban home.[66]

The significance of these cultural trends for
the development of the idea of the schizophrenogenic mother, despite the
originator herself being a woman, is that most of the psychiatric researchers
who pursued this line of research were men. The general notion they were
pursuing was of a dominating, over-protective, but basically rejecting mother
who somehow induced a schizophrenic reaction in her offspring.[67]
A considerable number of uncontrolled studies were undertaken that seemed to
confirm this premise. These were usually in the form of interview studies or
case-record studies without control groups.

However, by the early 1980s the concept of
the schizophrenogenic mother had run its course. A researcher could argue in
1982, after reviewing the literature on the subject, that ‘[t]he most plausible
explanation is that there is no sui generis
schizophrenogenic mother; instead, there is a parental type distinguished by
hostile, critical, and intrusive style and it is not particularly
over-represented in the parents of schizophrenics’.[68]
With further shifts in cultural values over the intervening years, it had
become apparent that only a small percentage of women who might arguably fit
the criteria of schizophrenogenic mother had actually produced schizophrenic
children. Conversely, many schizophrenics were found to have mothers who did
not fit the criteria.

By the early 1980s some psychiatric
researchers were ready to include the schizophrenogenic mother on a list with
other ‘dangerous psychosocial hypotheses’ that supposedly had retarded the
progress of psychiatry.[69]
Yet despite the hostility that had developed against the idea within the
psychiatric profession, and despite the lack of evidence to support it, the
schizophrenogenic mother was still being presented as a viable concept in
psychology textbooks up to the end of the 1980s.[70]